In-Depth Blog Post #3

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my third In-Depth blog post! Hope you’re doing well. 

Progress and what I’ve been doing this week: 

As always, I’ve been drawing regularly. This week I’ve been focusing solely on gestures and getting down the entire body instead of just the face. And I have gotta say I improved a lot. My gesture/pose drawing was super stiff and even the “quick” sketches took quite a bit of time. But since then, I’ve been able to get a good line of action with each character, and I’ve also been able to incorporate key shapes and lines into these drawings to make them much smoother and lay them out much quicker. Later in this week I’ll try to focus on the anatomy of the body to further reinforce my drawings and make it even easier. 

Something like this: (not as sharp but I’m getting there) 

Credit: https://lithub.com/how-learning-to-draw-can-help-a-writer-to-see/ 

I still think there’s a lot of room to improve and get better in, so I’ll continue to up my game when it comes to studying and learning. I still need to work on my digital art, since right now I’ve been going on a digital art hiatus and I’ve been focusing mostly on traditional. I’m even thinking of getting paints soon so I can experiment with those.  

Still trying to find a comfortable and consistent art style as well. But I do think that’ll come soon. So, in conclusion, I think my art journey is going super smoothly and I’m looking forward to what it has to offer in the future. 

My Mentor! (And how to have a beautiful mind): 

I had my second meeting with my mentor recently. This meeting was, in summary, talking about the human body and basic proportions. How the body is 8 head tall, etc. My mentor also talked about contour line drawing and how it can help with gesture, poses, and proportions. And if you don’t know what a contour drawing is, it’s basically drawing the outline of something, no shading, no sketching, just the outline. And in this case, it’s with only one line. This means you’re not allowed to take the pen off the paper. Which I personally thought was super cool. We also talked more about art, poses, and all that. But those were the main focuses of the meeting. We also discussed homework for our next meeting, and it was a wrap. Ended being a very productive meeting. 

Soooooo….. generating interest and being interesting during these meetings is probably the easiest thing to do, let me tell you why. First of all, I’m passionate about art, like super passionate, and my mentor is also super passionate about art. So, building common ground, connections, and interest is super easy. I’m always trying to bring up new ideas and approaches with my mentor, an example is the “what if” statement, “what if” we did it this way? Or what if we drew this with this technique, etc. Since with drawing, anything is a possibility. And whenever my mentor is bringing up something interesting, I always build off from it. To be fair, just bringing up the topic of art in this context will make the conversation interesting. Though instead of saying “Now that is interesting.” I say, “That’s awesome” or “Woah.” Which in my opinion give off the same energy. I’ve also come to learn that being interesting and having an interesting conversation generates a lot of fun. So I try my best to incorporate being interesting into every conversation. 

Responding is definitely important. Because if you don’t respond, then there’s no conversation! During the meeting with my mentor, I of course responded a few times. During some of those few times, I had to ask for some clarification, specifically with contour drawings since I’ve never heard of them before. I think asking for clarification is important because it makes sure that both people are on the same page and nobody is lagging behind. Another thing, like I mentioned in being interesting, is that I try my best to build off my mentor’s ideas with my own ideas and evidence. Though this meeting I lacked giving any stories, so I’ll definitely share those next time! I find responding to be based around exploring the subject, and I think we did in our second meeting! 

Thanks for tuning in,
Justin.